In general, a vehicle has three fundamentally necessary abilities including a “driving force” as an ability of “advancing”, a “steering force” as an ability of “turning”, and a “braking force” as an ability of “stopping”.
The “driving force” is a power, i.e., a torque generated by a power source of an internal combustion engine (hereinafter simply referred to as “engine”) in response to such an amount of depression of an accelerator pedal and transmitted through a transmission to driving wheels to be obtained as a frictional reaction force of the driving wheels and a road surface allowing the driving wheels to travel thereon. The “steering force” is obtained by a steering device capable of changing the advancing direction of, for example, front wheels in response to the operation amount of a steering wheel. The “braking force” is generated in response to the amount of depression of a brake pedal by slowing down or stopping the rotation of the driving wheels to generate a frictional reaction force of the driving wheels and the road surface allowing the vehicle to be stopped.
In general, the accelerator pedal and the brake pedal are located adjacent to each other in the neighborhood of the location of the driver's feet. Many drivers depress selectively the accelerator pedal or the brake pedal only with his or her right foot to control the “driving force” and the “braking force”, viz., to control a vehicle speed.
Therefore, there are some cases in which the simultaneous depressions of the accelerator pedal and the brake pedal as previously mentioned are apt to lead to deterioration in drivability.
There has so far been known a vehicle control apparatus which can reduce an engine torque in the event that the accelerator pedal and the brake pedal are depressed at the same time (see, for example, Patent Document 1).
The previously mentioned conventional vehicle is constructed to reduce the torque outputted by the engine with the fuel injection amount of the engine being temporarily reduced in the case that the accelerator pedal and the brake pedal are depressed at the same time.